Editing OWL through generated CNL

Abstract. Traditionally, Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs) are de-signed either to avoid ambiguity for human readers, or to facilitate auto-matic semantic analysis, so that texts can be transcoded to a knowledge representation language. CNLs of the second kind have recently been adapted to the requirements of knowledge formation in OWL for the Semantic Web. We suggest in this paper a variant approach based on automatic generation of texts in CNL (as opposed to automatic analy-sis), and argue that this provides the best of both worlds, allowing us to pursue human readability in addition to a precise mapping from texts to a formal language.

Natural language processing in CLIME, a multilingual legal advisory system

This paper describes CLIME, a web-based legal advisory system with a multilingual natural language interface. clime is a 'proof-of-concept' system which answers queries relating to ship-building and ship-operating regulations. Its core knowledge source is a set of such regulations encoded as a conceptual domain model and a set of formalised legal inference rules. The system supports retrieval of regulations via the conceptual model, and assessment of the legality of a situation or activity on a ship according to the legal inference rules. The focus of this paper is on the natural language aspects of the system, which help the user to construct semantically complex queries using wysiwym technology, allow the system to produce extended and cohesive responses and explanations, and support the whole interaction through a hybrid synchronous/asynchronous dialogue structure. Multilinguality (English and French) is viewed simply as interface localisation: the core representations are languageneutral, and the system can present extended or local interactions in either language at any time. The development of clime featured a high degree of client involvement, and the specification, implementation and evaluation of natural language components in this context are also discussed

Towards a generation-based semantic web authoring tool

Widespread use of Semantic Web technologies requires interfaces through which knowledge can be viewed and edited without deep understanding of Description Logic and formalisms like OWL and RDF. Several groups are pursuing approaches based on Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs), so that editing can be performed by typing in sentences which are automatically interpreted as statements in OWL. We suggest here a variant of this approach which relies entirely on Natural Language Generation (NLG), and propose requirements for a system that can reliably generate transparent realisations of statements in Description Logic

Joining up health and bioinformatics: e-science meets e-health

CLEF (Co-operative Clinical e-Science Framework) is an MRC sponsored project in the e-Science programme that aims to establish methodologies and a technical infrastructure forthe next generation of integrated clinical and bioscience research. It is developing methodsfor managing and using pseudonymised repositories of the long-term patient histories whichcan be linked to genetic, genomic information or used to support patient care. CLEF concentrateson removing key barriers to managing such repositories ? ethical issues, informationcapture, integration of disparate sources into coherent ?chronicles? of events, userorientedmechanisms for querying and displaying the information, and compiling the requiredknowledge resources. This paper describes the overall information flow and technicalapproach designed to meet these aims within a Grid framework

A Semantics-based User Interface Model for Content Annotation, Authoring and Exploration

The Semantic Web and Linked Data movements with the aim of creating, publishing and interconnecting machine readable information have gained traction in the last years. However, the majority of information still is contained in and exchanged using unstructured documents, such as Web pages, text documents, images and videos. This can also not be expected to change, since text, images and videos are the natural way in which humans interact with information. Semantic structuring of content on the other hand provides a wide range of advantages compared to unstructured information. Semantically-enriched documents facilitate information search and retrieval, presentation, integration, reusability, interoperability and personalization. Looking at the life-cycle of semantic content on the Web of Data, we see quite some progress on the backend side in storing structured content or for linking data and schemata. Nevertheless, the currently least developed aspect of the semantic content life-cycle is from our point of view the user-friendly manual and semi-automatic creation of rich semantic content. In this thesis, we propose a semantics-based user interface model, which aims to reduce the complexity of underlying technologies for semantic enrichment of content by Web users. By surveying existing tools and approaches for semantic content authoring, we extracted a set of guidelines for designing efficient and effective semantic authoring user interfaces. We applied these guidelines to devise a semantics-based user interface model called WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) which enables integrated authoring, visualization and exploration of unstructured and (semi-)structured content. To assess the applicability of our proposed WYSIWYM model, we incorporated the model into four real-world use cases comprising two general and two domain-specific applications. These use cases address four aspects of the WYSIWYM implementation: 1) Its integration into existing user interfaces, 2) Utilizing it for lightweight text analytics to incentivize users, 3) Dealing with crowdsourcing of semi-structured e-learning content, 4) Incorporating it for authoring of semantic medical prescriptions

IMPACTS in natural language generation NLG between technology and applications : workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany July 26-28, 2000

Instructional text, because it is a useful and relatively constrained sub-Ianguage, has been a popular target for research-oriented generation systems. This work has demonstrated that existing technology is adequate for generating draft instructions; the problem, as is typical of generation work in general, has been with the acquisition of domain and lexicogrammatical knowledge. This acquisition task is a formidable barrier to the practical use of generation technology. The Isolde project attempts to address this problem by extracting parts of the required knowledge from existing models and by building tools to tailor what is extracted into a form suitable for generation

IMPACTS in natural language generation NLG between technology and applications : workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany July 26-28, 2000

Instructional text, because it is a useful and relatively constrained sub-Ianguage, has been a popular target for research-oriented generation systems. This work has demonstrated that existing technology is adequate for generating draft instructions; the problem, as is typical of generation work in general, has been with the acquisition of domain and lexicogrammatical knowledge. This acquisition task is a formidable barrier to the practical use of generation technology. The Isolde project attempts to address this problem by extracting parts of the required knowledge from existing models and by building tools to tailor what is extracted into a form suitable for generation

Generating multimedia presentations: from plain text to screenplay

In many Natural Language Generation (NLG) applications, the output is limited to plain text – i.e., a string of words with punctuation and paragraph breaks, but no indications for layout, or pictures, or dialogue. In several projects, we have begun to explore NLG applications in which these extra media are brought into play. This paper gives an informal account of what we have learned. For coherence, we focus on the domain of patient information leaflets, and follow an example in which the same content is expressed first in plain text, then in formatted text, then in text with pictures, and finally in a dialogue script that can be performed by two animated agents. We show how the same meaning can be mapped to realisation patterns in different media, and how the expanded options for expressing meaning are related to the perceived style and tone of the presentation. Throughout, we stress that the extra media are not simple added to plain text, but integrated with it: thus the use of formatting, or pictures, or dialogue, may require radical rewording of the text itself